SeaChange International has hired Dave Ulmer as senior vice president & general manager for its Asia Pacific operations. The company is looking to burnish its multi-screen credentials by getting more involved in the mobile video market.

The patent describes a method for identifying dynamic advertising inventory and defining attributes of the ad, such as ownership, length and interactivity. The company believes the patent applicable regardless of which ad decisioning system or video delivery platform is used.

AT&T is offering its GigaPower service to select areas of Kansas City where it now competes against Google Fiber’s 1-gig service. Time Warner Cable is also ramping up a 300 Mbps down, 20 Mbps tier in Kansas City via its all-digital TWC Maxx upgrade.

Brooklyn union workers at Cablevision System Corp. have voted to ratify a two-year contract with the company. Communications Workers of America Local 1109 said the labor agreement was ratified by a strong margin Saturday night. More than 260 workers are covered by the agreement, which includes wages increases and better health and pension benefits.

Predicting the future is hard, and not for the faint of heart. But since CED is celebrating its 40th year, a number of friends graciously consented to help us out with our prognostications this year. Their contributions are herein.

It wasn’t all that long ago that anybody starting a streaming video business had to presume users would generally be sitting in front of (mostly) stationery PCs, landlocked in home offices and living rooms.

It’s no surprise that MSOs and others are taking a long look before leaping onto the programmatic bandwagon, but if they haven’t already done so, MSOs and other MVPDs should start down a programmatic adoption path.

Energy costs – already over $1 billion per year for the industry – could quadruple to $4 billion by the end of this decade. Throttling back that increase was the mission-critical objective that brought the industry together.

Virgin Media has thrown down the gauntlet against BT by announcing a five-year, $4.62 billion build out of its broadband network. Virgin Media has generally topped BT’s speeds in cities and towns across the UK where they compete against each other, but BT has enjoyed a larger broadband footprint.

Shaw Communications announced this week that it was closing its call centers in Calgary and Edmonton while also closing part of its operations in Kelowna. All told, 1,600 employees in those call centers will have to either re-locate, accept severance packages or take on new jobs at their current locations.

While the final numbers are still pending, ABI Research said in a report that the worldwide pay-TV market was expected to grow 5 percent in 2013 while topping 924.4 million subscribers. On a global scale, IPTV is the driving force behind the increased in subscribers.